Courtesy of Judith Gregg Librarian Catherine Arbogast heads out with a personalized book delivery from the Los Altos main library.

Love of learning and curiosity about the world sometimes grow only more urgent as a person spends more and more time at home, limited by age, health condition, or both. Librarians head out from the Los Altos main l...

Already known as an innovator in the tech field, Google Inc. is now moving in on the art world.

The Mountain View-based company July 11 launched the “Paint the Town” contest, a “moving art experiment” that invites California residents over the age of 13 to submit physical or digital artwork that would decorate the door...

Traci Newell/Town Crier The six-week, tuition-free Stretch to Kindergarten program, hosted at Bullis Charter School, serves children who have not attended preschool. A teacher leads children in singing about the parts of a butterfly, above.

courtesy of Rishi Bommannan Rishi Bommannan cycled from Bates College in Maine to his home in Los Altos Hills, taking several selfies along the way. He also raised nearly $13,000 for the Livestrong Foundation, which supports cancer patients.

The Town Crier’s recent article on coyotes venturing down from the foothills in search of sustenance referenced the organization Project Coyote (“Recent coyote attacks keep residents on edge,” July 1). Do not waste your time contac...

Photos by Alicia Castro/Town Crier Local residents participate in an exercise class at the Grant Park Senior Center, above. Betsy Reeves, below left with Gail Enenstein, lobbied for senior programming in south Los Altos.

Grace Wilson Franks, our beloved mother and grandmother, left us peacefully on July 16, 2015 just a few weeks short of her 92nd birthday. She was born to Ross and Florence (Cruzan) Wilson in rural Tulare, California on Septem...

Most of us have a place inside our hearts and minds that occasionally causes us trouble. For some, it is sadness, depression or despair. For others, it may be fear, anger, resentment or myriad other emotional “dark places” that at times seem to hij...

If you have an investment account at a brokerage firm, chances are you’ve encountered a risk tolerance questionnaire.

Such a document purports to determine how comfortable you are with investment risk. Questions range from the simple, “Are you investing primarily for income or for growth?” to the sublime, “If you are offered $100 or the chance to win either $0 or $300, which would you choose?” The firms use the questionnaires to help salespeople sell you suitable investments, but they also serve as protection should the firm be audited by its regulator.

The problem? These questionnaires pretty much tell us nothing about your true risk tolerance.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were among the pioneers of what is currently called “behavioral finance,” which attempts to understand the psychology behind the behavior of investors and ultimately how it affects the capital markets. One of their most fundamental findings – for which Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 – was that people’s attitudes toward risks concerning gains might be quite different from their attitudes toward risks concerning losses.

For example, in answer to the gambling question above, risk-averse people will typically choose the $100. However, when confronted with the inverse choice of losing $100 or the chance to lose $0 or $300, the same people will commonly select the risky option ($0 or -$300).

The prevailing economic environment also often influences this asymmetrical attitude toward risk. In early 2009, one of my clients had become so risk-averse that she was ready to sell all her investments. Of course I spent time with her explaining the value of sticking to her financial plan and investment strategy. By 2010 – after her portfolio had rebounded not only from market action but from some tactical allocations to a couple of highly undervalued asset classes – she had become so risk-indifferent as to ask what could be done to get her portfolio to outperform that of her neighbor.

Balancing risk tolerance

In practice, I’ve found that risk tolerance should really be considered in two contexts: (1) your need for risk, and (2) your ability to stomach risk.

The first has to do with your financial plan and how much you need to grow your savings in order to have enough money to support everything you want to do for the rest of your life. The higher the needed growth, the greater the risk you will need to take with your investments (and consequently the greater the potential of having to give up some of your goals).

The second involves your emotional ability to deal with losses. If you are fortunate, the two are aligned – that is, your financial situation is such that you don’t need to take on any more risk with your investments than you can handle should markets drop. Your financial life can become stressful, however, when the two are out of sync. There are many people, for example, who keep all their savings in bank CDs. Clearly they are risk-averse in the emotional sense. But they may be taking on too much risk of achieving their future goals given the potential ravages inflation can impose on a long retirement-lifetime portfolio.

In the end, I’m convinced that a financial plan will help you not only balance the two risk tolerance components, but also act as an emotional anchor when times get tough (like in 2008).

Knowing that you have a plan and maintaining the discipline to follow it can help you avoid making the kinds of risky, dysfunctional investment decisions that we as human beings are all too prone to do.

Artie Green, a Los Altos resident, is a Certified Financial Planner and principal at Cognizant Wealth Advisors. For more information, call 209-4062 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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